What is a DocumentTracker?
A DokuMate DocumentTracker is an Excel table that lists all documents contained in a selected local or SharePoint folder and its sub-folders. The DocumentTracker allows you to:
- view title page metadata (e.g., title, date, revision number, status) of all documents;
- edit the title page metadata and update all documents with one click of a button;
- rename or move documents within the folder;
- open tracked documents in their respective applications (e.g., Microsoft Word) without leaving the DocumentTracker;
- run various automated operations on all tracked documents;
- perform search-and-replace operations in all tracked documents; and
- for contract documents, find or format references and defined terms.
The DocumentTracker can be created for:
- folders on your local machine (incl. Dropbox folders synchronized with your local machine, for example) and
- SharePoint Online folders.
How do you create a DocumentTracker?
To create a Local DocumentTracker, i.e., one that tracks a local local folder, simply click on the table icon of the split button shown below.
To create a SharePoint Online DocumentTracker, i.e., one that tracks a SharePoint Online folder, click on the label "DocumentTracker" (not on the table icon), which will bring up a menu from which you can then select "Insert SharePoint Online DocumentTracker".
If you look at the menu above, you can also create the Local DocumentTracker by clicking on the corresponding menu item. Clicking on the table icon does the same thing and requires fewer clicks.
How do you configure and create a Local DocumentTracker
After having clicked on the table icon or the "Insert Local DocumentTracker" menu item, you will see the following dialog, which asks for key configuration parameters.
- DocumentTracker Template. This template defines which document properties should be displayed in which column order in the DocumentTracker. Selecting the right template is important if you added specific, data-bound content controls to your documents that should be displayed and editable. You can either select a specific Word template (e.g., the one used to create your Word documents) or the active Excel workbook. To make changes to the document properties that are displayed and editable in the DocumentTracker, click the Edit Document Properties button.
- Tracked Root Folder. The DocumentTracker lists all documents contained in the Local Folder Path and its sub-folders.
- DocumentTracker Options. You can activate the following options (although you typically want to leave them unchecked):
- Run Unit Tests on documents included in the DocumentTracker. This performs certain predefined quality checks on the documents.
- Enforce unique document identifiers. This makes sure you use unique DocId values in your documents. As DocIds serve as a unique key for the documents, this prevents you from accidentally having duplicate values.
Once you have specified everything as desired, click OK to have DokuMate create the DocumentTracker. DokuMate will open all Microsoft Office documents and read metadata from those documents. For other types of documents, DokuMate will pick the metadata from the file name, which will only produce the desired results, however, if you follow the file naming convention as used by DokuMate when standardizing file names.
How do you configure and create a SharePoint Online DocumentTracker
After having clicked on the "Insert SharePoint Online DocumentTracker" menu item, you will see the following dialog, which generally asks for the same configuration parameters as the corresponding dialog for a Local DocumentTracker. Only the Tracked Root Folder is specified differently.
To select a SharePoint Online folder as the Tracked Root Folder, you have to specify certain SharePoint-specific pieces of information, most of which you can find in typical SharePoint URLs as displayed in your browser (e.g., "https://dokumate.sharepoint.com/sites/TestTeamSite" for the site itself):
- SharePoint Domain. This is the qualified domain name (e.g., "dokumate.sharepoint.com"), which, for SharePoint Online, consists of the Office365 tenant name (e.g., "dokumate") and the "sharepoint.com" domain. If your desired SharePoint Domain is not already in the list, you must enter the name and hit the TAB key. If you entered a new SharePoint Domain, DokuMate will present an Office365 login dialog.
- SharePoint Site. This is the URL path segment (e.g., "sites/TestTeamSite") of the SharePoint site, which can contain multiple document libraries. If you have appropriate access rights, DokuMate will list the available sites once you have entered or selected the SharePoint Domain in the previous step. If you don't see any SharePoint Sites in the list after a short while, you don't have the permission to list the sites and, therefore, must enter the SharePoint Site yourself. In that case, you should pick up the information from the URL.
- SharePoint Library. Once you have entered or selected the SharePoint Site, DokuMate will automatically populate or update the list of SharePoint Libraries of the selected SharePoint Site. You should not have to enter the SharePoint Library yourself. Just pick the desired SharePoint Library from the drop-down list.
- SharePoint Folder. Once you have selected the SharePoint Library, DokuMate will provide an up-to-date list of the folder paths from which you should select the desired SharePoint folder to be tracked.
As for the Local DocumentTracker, once you have specified everything as desired, click OK to have DokuMate create the DocumentTracker. DokuMate will retrieve all documents from SharePoint, open all Microsoft Office documents, and read metadata from those documents. For other types of documents, DokuMate will pick the metadata from the file name, which will only produce the desired results, however, if you follow the file naming convention as used by DokuMate when standardizing file names.
How do you change the document properties (columns) shown in the DocumentTracker?
To change the document properties, or columns, displayed in the DocumentTracker, click the Edit Document Properties button shown above. This will bring up the following dialog, which lets you add, delete, reorder, edit, and select document properties to which content controls in Microsoft Word can be data-bound.
- The Content Control Tag column displays the tag names (e.g., docId) used to identify the content controls in Microsoft Word. They are used as the local name portion of the qualified names (e.g., dp:docId) of the XML elements used for storing the data values (e.g., "[ID]").
- Using the check boxes in the Tracked column, you can select or deselect the document properties to be included in the DocumentTracker. In the example above, all document properties except for thirdParty are selected.
- Using the check boxes in the Grouped column, you can define whether the corresponding Excel column will be grouped under the last preceding column that is not grouped. For example, the docRevisionNumber, docAuthor, and docStatus columns will be grouped under the docDate column. This way, you can expand and collapse columns to quickly show more or less information.
- The Value column displays the values of those document properties as they exist in the template or document you selected. For templates, those are the default values used in documents created from those templates.
- The various buttons should be self-explanatory.